Granpa was right in the end

My grandfather Ramón used to say: “The men who went up to the Moon drove the weather crazy!” As a kid I thought: “Poor grandpa, he’s so ignorant! He knows nothing at all about astronauts or about the climate”. And I kept on thinking that way for many years after his death in 1983.

But one day, after many years learning about climate change and other disruptions on Earth caused by our civilization, I remembered that saying and suddenly realized that my grandfather was right. Of course he was not literally right in his accusation. But he was indeed metaphorically right. I realized that the astronauts were a symbol, a representation for the industrial, modern civilization. They could be even a symbol of its more absurd and fatuous side: why expend so much money and energy in a travel to the Moon when there are such a terrible lot of things still to fix right down here? —he might have thought that.

What I hadn’t realized as a kid, a boy raised in the city, in the modern state educational system, was that my grandfather had a different way of thinking, quite distinct from the rationality that is cultivated in schools. He was a traditional peasant, an indigenous Galician with a different kind of logic, who basically thought with metaphors woven into stories.

Even after being forced to transplant himself into a foreign culture and work as a janitor in an industrial city, his mind still understood the world through symbols, and the notion of the mission to the Moon breaking the weather on Earth was merely his tale to explain why climate was changing. It was just the begining of the 80s, so I think he also had a great intuition capable of perceiving slight changes in weather patterns that could have been happening in that time. Similarly to the intuitions of other peasants of his time who were experiencing the first impacts of industrialization in the rural society back in his Galician homeland, his guess was that weird enormous things being done by modern culture were to blame for that attack on the Natural World’s order.

So, yes, my granpa was right and I was a stupid and arrogant kid.

Now I just hope to be a humbler man who still has the time to grow a little indigenous mind upon my old rationalist views of the World. I’d use it to create stories that better connect our predicament and the ways out of it with people’s narrative minds. Then I would teach my daughter, who is the same age that I was when I lost grandpa Ramón, about the myth of the astronauts, and I would join a new tribe of story-tellers across the World to weave new myths about industrial capitalist madness and peasant indigenous wisdom.